ABSTRACT
The soul has no substance as typically understood in a materialistic way. In Western usage, the 'soul' would refer to the collection of relationships in humans or other animals; the term 'form' would refer to those relationships in physical-level objects and some biological entities, such as plants; and for the relationships of higher-level systems, one might refer to the 'soul of a community' or the 'spirit of a church'. In the systems model, Merton struggled to discover cultural systems that would support transcendent-level relationships. Merton writes: 'All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered'. Merton's understanding of the person's true and false self develops in his exploration of Buddhism. From a Christian perspective informed by Buddhism, Merton makes clear that the self-proclaimed autonomy of the false self is an illusion.
